Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Dead Island Riptide Torso Makes the Internet Go Crazy

Early this morning, Deep Silver, the publisher of Dead Island, sent out a press release touting premium versions of their new title: Deep Island Riptide. As has become the norm for the industry, Dead Island Riptide comes with a useless trinket, that gamers can add to their shelves, right next to dusty Master Chief helmets and broken Modern Warfare 2 goggles.

Except this time, the trinket is boobs.

Well, if you live in Europe, at least. The European collector's edition of Dead Island Riptide comes with a super sexy severed torso. Effectively, it's a bust of bloody, decaying breasts. Mind you, they're not nude, so there's that. But still, it's a statue of a female torso.

Try to explain that to the next lovely lady lucky enough to grace your man cave.

Me so horny.

As you might expect, this kicked off a firestorm of indignation across the Internet, with gamers, the press, and just about everyone finding this whole thing to be more than a little tacky. Several publicationsweighed in with their opinions on the matter, and the larger issue of sexism in the videogame industry.

For what it's worth, Deep Silver issued an apology early this afternoon. You can read it here:

"We deeply apologize for any offense caused by the Dead Island Riptide
"Zombie Bait Edition," the collector's edition announced for Europe and
Australia. Like many gaming companies, Deep Silver has many offices in
different countries, which is why sometimes different versions of
Collector's Editions come into being for North America, Europe,
Australia, and Asia.

For the limited run of the Zombie Bait Edition for Europe and
Australia, a decision was made to include a gruesome statue of a zombie
torso, which was cut up like many of our fans had done to the undead
enemies in the original Dead Island.

We sincerely regret this choice. We are collecting feedback continuously from the Dead Island
community, as well as the international gaming community at large, for
ongoing internal meetings with Deep Silver's entire international team
today. For now, we want to reiterate to the community, fans and industry
how deeply sorry we are, and that we are committed to making sure this
will never happen again."

Notice how they never said they were going to, you know, actually change the statue, discontinue it, or anything.

The real question I'm posing here, is to you; the readers. Do you buy these Collector's Editions? Is that statue offensive, or just dumb? Is this the best advertising Deep Silver could have ever asked for?

Christopher Linendoll loves him some torso. He can be reached via Twitter, or found in the hummus section of your local grocery store.